monitoring disk related activity on linux

[webstar]

By using iostat, it is possible to gain a bit more insight into
disk-related activity:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$iostat
Linux 2.4.21-1.1931.2.349.2.2.entsmp (raptor.example.com)
07/21/2003
avg-cpu: %user %nice %sys %idle
5.34 4.60 2.83 87.24
Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn
dev8-0 1.10 6.21 25.08 961342 3881610
dev8-1 0.00 0.00 0.00 16 0

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This output shows us that the device with major number 8 (which is
/dev/sda, the first SCSI disk) averaged slightly more than one I/O
operation per second (the tsp field). Most of the I/O activity for this device
were writes (the Blk_wrtn field), with slightly more than 25 blocks
written each second (the Blk_wrtn/s field).

[peterdoown]

I am looking for a Linux command line tool that will report disk IO activity. Would really like htop cool.Has people had heard of something like that? For the veto: on non-programming related. I just need to check the performance of my code is actually involved as I look forward to looking at the IO activities. Please accept my apology, if it does not involve enough.

[Inoxbreeze]

Iostat is ideal tool to get disk related information on the server.

[Deltahost]

iostat show only whole disk usage but not per process.
Since kernel 2.6.20 available "iotop" tool. iotop will show disk usage on per process basis (just like "top" for IO)